Todd Howard: Fallout 76 had 'a lot of difficulties' during development

Fallout 76's launch was a disaster—one of the worst in PC gaming history, by our reckoning. Its quests were boring and repetitive, the PC version was missing basic features such as text chat, and bugs were making players invincible. This week, Bethesda Game Studios executive producer Todd Howard spoke out on the subject, admitting the developer had "a lot of difficulties during development".

"We knew we were going to have a lot of bumps coming out with the game, and we definitely had some, some of them a lot harder than we anticipated. It was a very new and different project for us," he said during a PAX East panel.

"We had a lot of difficulties during development and sometimes those difficulties do show up on the screen. You never want them to," he said. "We grew the studio, we're four different studios now in North America...and this was a game that really took a ton of people across those four studios coming together to make work."

He didn't go into any more detail about what exactly the difficulties were that Bethesda faced, and instead looked ahead to future plans for the game, including its survival mode, which is currently in beta (and will kill you in a hundred different ways).

You can watch Howard make his comments in the video below.

Thanks, USGamer.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.